While CMON’s HATE board game is causing a stir in the community, the subject of one of the company’s 2017 Kickstarter campaigns is just starting to arrive with backers.
Rising Sun is a board game set in legendary feudal Japan. It’s up to each player to engage in politics to further their cause, negotiate to seek the most profitable alliances, worship the Kami to gain their favour, recruit monsters out of legend to bolster their forces, and use resources wisely to be victorious in battle.
The game features the kind of stunning miniatures that CMON has become famous for, and initial reviews seem to indicate the game play is just as good.
However, both Twitter user John Brieger and Casey Smith on BoardGameGeek spotted an irregularity that whilst amusing for the community at large, might prove an embarassment to CMON, who appear not to have fact-checked their research too fully.
The crowdfunding campaign for Rising Sun was hugely successful, raising over $4.2M, and as it progressed more and more stretch goals were unlocked, including this one for the Kōtahi:
However, there’s no Kōtahi in Japanese mythology… probably because it’s a Moari word. However, since the CMON team appear to have done most of their Monster reasearch for the game from a Wiki page on eastern mythology, they appear to have taken the Kōtahi entry at face value, without fact-checking it further:
If they’d dug a little deeper they might have discovered that the Wiki entry itself was only added in September 2016, by this man (and his friends) from Dannvirke in New Zealand:
This was confirmed by Brieger personally when he contacted Mr Bradford, but a cursory glance at the Wiki edit log points to this anyway:
Kotahi himself dropped in on the BoardGameGeek forum thread and gave this explanation:
Yeah so about this thing… It was one of my online buddies from Australia that was trolling one night about three or so years ago editing Wikipedia pages, Kotahi-Manawa is my name and the ‘rage’ refers to the way I sometimes rage when we’re playing games, Tyralis contacted me on Facebook and I thought it was a pretty funny and interesting way to wake up lol, I thought it was funny how much research the devs put into the characters of this game. I actually really like the art though…
So the moral of this story is: if you’re building a game around the mythology of a foreign culture, you’d best fact-check every character to ensure you’re not including some random dude from New Zealand as a monster in your game.
The other moral is: don’t be afraid to put yourself out there on Wiki – you might end up a character in a board game!
